Wrestling with the Rottweiler: On Reading Mr. Dawkins

So I finally read the controversial bestseller The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, two years after I read--and almost unquestioningly accepted--one of its formal rebuttals, Karen Armstrong’s The Case For God. Critics of Armstrong who also happen to be fans of Dawkins may be disappointed that my respect and admiration for Armstrong has not diminished, after reading Dawkins’s work. This is in part because I don’t believe that they’re direct, natural opponents. But I will disagree with Armstrong in her portrayal of Dawkins as overly aggressive or militant. What I have found in Dawkins is a mind as scrupulous as he is unflinching in his search for truth. The God Delusion is full of wit, robust logic, and great passion. There were moments where his contempt for religion nearly overrode the content of his arguments, but the content itself was virtually airtight, especially where it concerned religion’s track record. But again, his love for the natural world is greater than his hatred for the supernatural. I especially felt his love for the reality of the universe that science has unveiled, in the very last segment of the book, titled “The Mother of All Burkas”. But I’ll say no more about whether he takes it too far or not. You should go and read it and decide for yourself.

Theist? Atheist? Agnostic?

I decided to read this book because I felt it would be irresponsible of me not to. I read Armstrong’s response to New Atheism, so it’s only fair to examine New Atheism itself, right? Prompted by The Case for God I’ve spent the past two years reading books on religion, written by believers and nonbelievers alike. I’ve been reading book after book in an attempt to clarify not just what stance is best to take on religion, but exactly what it is I believe to be the truth about existence. I read this book most recently because I have been trying to sort out a very complicated relationship I have with religion and the idea of God.

To say I had lost my faith in God would be inaccurate, because I’m not quite sure I had any to begin with. My history with faith could be characterized by a series of attempts to get it, as though it were something I was lacking. This seems like a good enough indicator to stop trying,yet I’ve been compelled by and attracted to many aspects of religion all the same. Every time I thought I was done with it, something pulled me back. I felt very confused, and didn’t know where to stand. Whether it was faith (whatever that could possibly mean) or merely a sentimental loyalty, this feeling clearly demanded my attention. I felt condemned to agnosticism, and I didn’t particularly like being there, hoping that if I dug just a little deeper, I could discover what notion is enthroned in my psyche. So I wanted to see if ‘Darwin’s Rottweiler’ Richard Dawkins could tip me--poor, indecisive wretch--in the direction of atheism. I wanted to see if he could change my mind. I hoped to test my own views on religion and see if they stood up to the author’s rhetoric. Any God that could be argued away by just a book, I reasoned, was obviously a god I didn’t truly believe in, and not something worth believing in in the first place. Not just considering his arguments, but observing my reaction to his arguments would reveal myself to myself. So reading a book like The God Delusion was a method of honing, sharpening, and clarifying.

Biting Back

I was surprised by it, in a few ways. First, I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did. I’m not a huge fan of polemic, but I must admit it was great fun to read, thanks to the wit and clarity of Dawkins’ prose. The kind of atheism Dawkins espouses is a much more politicized one. He encourages atheists to stand up to the discrimination they face. Atheists and skeptics are not given the same respect afforded to believers in many parts of the world, the uber-religious United States being one of them. Yes, he does outright attack religion in many places (mainly the parts where it sucks), but he wasn’t nearly as aggressive as I thought he would be. He seemed less pugnacious as Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape (and even less so than Hitchens in God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything). But if his words do seem barbed, you can hardly blame him, seeing as his own profession and everything he’s worked for is itself under threat from religious lobbyists trying to force schools to teach creationism and Intelligent Design alongside evolution. And let’s not forget when he was writing this book, the Bush administration had been halting funding in the U.S. for stem-cell research, a potentially life-saving pursuit. He feels his world--which is also everybody’s, by the way--is under attack. They bite, and he bites back (with pen, sans sword). So, fair enough.

Zeitgeist

But above all, I was also surprised at how much I agreed with him. A lot of his arguments I had at least heard the gist of before (such as were phrased by Comte-Sponville in The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, and John Shelby Spong in The Sins of Scripture), while other conclusions he made were ones I had arrived at on my own, only to find them articulated better here. For example, I was always troubled by the way people tend to be selective of which parts of the Bible they obey, depending on their own cultural standards. This suggested that people don’t actually derive their morals from the Bible, but rather from standards outside and independent of it. Dawkins covers this in the chapter titled ‘The “Good Book” and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist’:

Remember, all I am trying to establish for the moment is that we do not, as a matter of fact, derive our morals from scripture. Or, if we do, we pick and choose among the scriptures for the nice bits and reject the nasty. But then we must have some independent criterion for deciding which are the moral bits: a criterion which, wherever it comes from, cannot come from scripture itself and is presumable available to all of us whether we are religious or not.

Of course, many religious people today don’t take the Bible literally, and don’t feel as though they have to, in light of the Bible scholarship that has emerged in the past two hundred years. But a non-literal view makes it much trickier to hold on to religion as we know it. Some can manage it, others can’t. I have been trying to find out which camp I belong to, and if God has any meaning left to me. If anything of my spiritual ties to Christianity remains, it has a closer resemblance to Spong’s non-theistic version. And for that reason, I actually found it easy to side with Dawkins on many points.

Religion = Child Abuse

Another point Dawkins raises that’s bothered me so often in the past is the contingency of religious belief. The biggest reason why I might prefer to be a Christian rather than a Muslim or a Rastafarian is because I was raised, more or less, as a Christian, and have lived in a predominantly Christian culture. How unfortunate for those living outside of Christendom! Are they to be damned forever because they weren’t lucky enough to be raised with a bias toward Lord Jesus Christ? More often than not faith is not a choice, so how could a loving God force an impossible choice on us? The habits we’re taught in childhood are incredibly powerful. And what Dawkins wants us to consider is calling a child a “Muslim girl” or a “Christian boy” is as ridiculous as calling one a “Marxist child”. He does not ask people to raise their children as atheists per se, but to raise them to think for themselves and decide what they believe after they’ve learned enough about the world and are mature enough to make that decision on their own. Makes sense to me. At first, I was a little shocked that he went so far as to call indoctrination a form of child abuse, but the more I consider it, the more I realize he’s definitely on to something.

“Gateway Drug” Religion

Religious moderates and religious liberals may resent the way Dawkins lumps them in the same camp as fundamentalists, but he does make a compelling case for doing so, however much it rankles people. One thing he mentions which I hadn’t considered before, and which I find very difficult to shake off, is that even though a religious practice and the doctrine behind it may be perfectly innocuous in most cases, it may lead to more sinister strains, as so many are based on something not based on conclusive evidence, and driven by faith, which doesn’t require evidence. The fact that so many of the 14th Dalai Lama’s followers regard him as a reincarnation of the semi-divine spirit Avalokitesvara makes them vulnerable to all sorts of abuses of power. Thankfully Tenzin Gyatso is an open-minded and compassionate person, and has given up his role as head of the Tibetan government-in-exile, and remains only a head of state and their spiritual leader. This is great, but this lineage is still a gamble, like all monarchies that claim power by divine right. Again, he has done much to bolster the hopes and morale of his people and promote peace throughout the world; I think this can’t be overstated. But while the Tibetans of Dharamsala are more democratically organized now, keep in mind that it took thirteen (Buddhist) predecessors to get to this point. And those ones didn’t seem to mind having all that power.

Credo: A Rough Sketch

If nothing else, I realised from reading this book that I have much more in common with atheists than I do theists: I believe in evolution. I believe the universe came into being 13.7 billion years ago. I believe that human beings are just another form of complex life, one more species among the billions on this planet, and we have an intelligence to which other animals are not entirely restricted, therefore we are not as special in the animal kingdom as we thought. I believe we are capable of uplifting acts of goodness, as well as chilling acts of evil, and neither are necessarily proof of a good or evil will pervading the entire, non-living universe. We are extraordinary, but we are not the be-all and end-all of evolution, because it’s an ongoing story and something better than us will emerge, (if we don’t destroy the planet, that is). I believe in all of these things which we have learned through the scientific method. And if new evidence came along to discredit it all, I would simply have to change my beliefs to suit the facts.

There are theists who believe all these things as well, but where I differ with them is that whatever transcendent experience we can acquire in this lifetime--satori, Grace, Brahman, creative flow--it is not likely to be the result of a Super-intelligence coming in from outside of our universe and deliberately injecting us with Himself. Whatever divinity is, it probably comes from within us, not from Elsewhere. Also, I don’t believe in the literal Virgin Birth, Resurrection, or any other such miracles, any more than I believe in the literal virgin birth of the Buddha or the literal resurrection of Osiris.

I can’t express how tempted I am to think in theistic terms, but if I were to be ruthlessly honest I would have to admit that there is no proof that our access to enlightenment is caused by Someone Else. I believe our focus on the hereafter is a threat to the good that comes from the here and now: this is the only good we’ve known, because now is all we have. There’s a reason our visions of heaven resemble Earth but shinier; it’s the only point of reference we have. C.S. Lewis’ assertion that because nothing on earth could satisfy his deepest longing implied there must be something beyond this world that does is unconvincing, though extremely attractive. It feels redundant to state these empirically verified beliefs, because I’ve held them for a long time now. But this book confronts me with them, and reminds me that to accept these things as truth and then adopt a worldview not based on them is irresponsible and lazy.

“To you be your religion; to me, mine.”

What I also appreciated about this book is that Dawkins cuts admirably through all the moral relativism that floats around in secular society. In a culture where it’s more P.C. to say ‘I don’t agree with you’ than to say ‘your argument is wrong’, I’m kind of impressed by his brass. If a Christian believes that only through accepting Jesus can we be saved, then this belief implies the corollary that souls of non-believers are in mortal danger.

He may not admit it in polite conversation, but it’s there. And yet I can’t even count how many conversations I’ve had that have shied away from it, out of politeness, or politics. Of course, a Christian can also believe in another person’s right to disagree. But that same person believes in a God who presides over believers and non-believers alike. It’s the same with an atheist. Even if an atheist says “You can believe what you like, I don’t agree with you,” he is implying that he thinks the other person’s worldview is false. We associate argument with discord and aggression, but it can have positive benefits as well. Being goaded into a kind of intellectual sparring match can helps us to clarify what it is we're defending. In arguing "your views are incorrect and here is why..." he forces readers to be really honest with themselves.

Let’s Talk

Attacking, demonizing and belittling the other side is obviously no solution. As the religion debate is enflamed more and more every day, I think we’ve got to be as compassionate and respectful as possible as we attempt to carry on a dialogue. Of course, it is difficult to hold a conversation when the other side is wholly devoted to your annihilation. But even in more peaceful company there is a danger in simply saying ‘you have your beliefs and I have mine’, agreeing to disagree and then going off and living in one's own hermetically sealed worlds. Living so subjectively makes it nearly impossible to speak meaningfully about anything, and we start to teeter over into nihilism. I think by taking a bolder stance on the matter Dawkins is trying to call our attention to that danger. Just because, as the truism goes, truth is subjective, it doesn't mean we aren't allowed to have our own convictions about the world. We’ve simply got to keep talking, and be open to our minds being changed. People accuse Dawkins of the same narrow thinking he diagnoses in his fundamentalist opponents, but he claims that if there was any sufficient evidence to discount evolution by natural selection or the Big Bang for that matter, he would be obliged to abandon these concepts, because that's what scientists must do. A fundamentalist, on the other hand, would dig their heels in deeper. Skeptics may have the upper-hand in this ongoing dialogue, because they are more ready to say “I was wrong” than their religious counterparts.

Homo Religiosus

Alright, so once finishing, the question remains: has Dawkins changed my mind about God? How about religion?

Dawkins covers almost every possible angle on religion, and you feel compelled to take a side. Let’s face it: religion’s track record is abysmal. And it is not just because it has been hijacked by human greed, hatred, fear and lust for power. People also do terrible things because they believe in them.

Perhaps religion should just die off, but in all honesty I think it won’t, not any time soon. However, I also think there’s still a great deal we can learn from religion, even if many of us can no longer return to its insane orthodoxies. I’ve talked about this before, but I’ll try to go into more detail about where I stand in a later post. For now I'll finish by saying I can’t agree with Dawkins, one hundred per cent, though I'm pretty close. Does this mean I am an atheist? Well, from everything I've just written it may sound like de facto atheism. This may be so, but even now the matter feels unresolved in my mind, and needs a post of its own, so I'll hold off here as well. I am far from finished with God. As far as religion is concerned, there may be ways of rethinking and reinventing it. It may take an imaginative leap not seen since the Axial Age to do it, but I still believe, however naïvely, that it is possible. If our name truly is Homo Religiosus and we are wired for religion as many anthropologists claim, this leap will have to be possible, or we may be seriously screwed as a species.